An Illusion Created By Tables And Chairs

       photo by Amber Dodds

It may just have been an illusion created by tables and chairs but last night's show at The Prince Albert in Brighton appeared to be full of people. We were definitely out of practice as we blundered through a set that seemed to be making up its own mind as it went along but no one noticed and I think we actually left the stage to rapturous applause. I can't actually be sure of that because I develop a weird skill during the eighties of blocking out end of the set applause in case it was jeers and catcalls, or simply non-existent.
Tonight we're playing in London. Before we set off for the gig we're going to write our Kickstarter proposal. We've already made a promotional film - it looks like a K-Tel advert (but more low budget). By the end of the weekend it could well be up and running - a curious idiom - up and running - why not plugged in with the switch in the "on" position and the red light glowing? I sometimes wonder who thinks up these expressions. But anyway... you could be watching our film, pledging support and all that sort of stuff by the end of the weekend. Or at the beginning of next week.
If our Flip Camera Windows Movie Maker film doesn't turn us into successful video directors overnight (and of course we fully expect it will), and if the Kickstarter thing works, we'll be releasing our third album together sometime in August. We're calling it A Working Museum.
Now I've got to pilot a hire van to London without wrecking any more badly parked Renault Clios. But more about that later.

Hands Across The Ocean

I'm leaving America for the second time since I started living here last September. It's a bit of a shame because the weather's really good at the moment, hot, sunny and not unbearably humid. England might be having good weather but it's never as warm.

I'm worried that I might have gone native – I found myself completely unselfconsciously referring to trousers as pants the other day, something I never would have thought possible just a few months ago.. It's ridiculous, I was in a green grocers trying to buy tomatoes and almost stooped to some of these guys as a way round the absolutely terrifying termaydoe. Tomato... it's become a word I can hardly get my mouth around in any pronounciation.
You don't consider these details in the gung-ho moment (a moment that lasted about a year for us) of moving continents.

As I was saying - I'm slightly uneasy coming back to England in case I've mutated, into an American without noticing – speaking with a slight transatlantic twang, eating with just a fork and ignoring the knife, demanding service and air-conditioning, tipping everyone that moves, wearing a loud checked jacket which I'll refer to as a coat...
But take heart, I began this piece by talking about the weather – there's nothing more British than that. It's what we do best. Apart from negativity, cynicism and sarcasm. Americans don't talk about the weather the way we do, any more than American men signal fancying a girl by standing on one leg, flapping there arms and talking drivel in a panicky voice (a singularly British male trait).

We arrived at the airport three hours early because it was Memorial Day, the nearest thing in America to August Bank Holiday. The traffic on the New York State Thruway was approaching dreadful – on a par with a typical Sunday afternoon on the M1. For a while we were worried but we'd taken the precaution of leaving early and suddenly we were in New Jersey and New Jersey was deserted because all of New Jersey, apart from those unlucky enough to live in the city of Newark are, according to the car rental return guy, sitting on beaches between Asbury Park and Atlantic City until Tuesday afternoon.
Newark Liberty International Airport is in the middle of a makeover, or a facelift. Bits of the terminal appear to be boxed off with large sheets of white melamine plastered with notices that say Pardon Our Appearance While We Work To Give You A Better Flying Experience. They should have signs that say Pardon The Unbearable Stench Of Rotting Garbage. (Garbage??? I'm sorry but refuse, rubbish or ordure wouldn't make sense in the context. It's as well to be vigilant though.) The landfill stench that pervade parts of northern New Jersey seems to have permeated the hermetically sealed airport environment. It's the smell of chemical deoderisers hastilly applied to stale vomit. A strange smell for an airport.
We had thoughts of gatecrashing the first class lounge. I thought they might feel sorry for us or even be charmed by our shabby guitar cases and so on. I imagined claiming to be with Rod Stewart: Isn't he here yet?!!? That's so typically Rod. Mind if we come in and wait? Followed by unpleasantness and: ...when Rod gets here you'll be looking for a new job young lady. And an undignified exit.
But we didn't. We climbed a marble staircase and peered in at an imperious British Airways stewardess clutching a clipboard-load of elligible names. Our wouldn't have been on it and there was no sign of Rod so we went back down the stairs and bought some overpriced food at a coffee stand between Hudson Stationers and the duty-free perfume outlet which was doing nothing to mask the smell of landfill.

At least the plane was new. Though that was a mixed blessing. New means some designer who has never suffered the indignity of flying steerage class finds a way of ramming a few more rows of seats in. There was a great choice and films and so on but once the guy in front had reclined his seat as far as it would go the screen was so close I had to put on reading glasses to decipher the pixels. And when the dinner came – forget it – the height of the seat in relation to the table coupled with the in-the-face seat back made it almost impossible to eat without my head touching the touch-sensitive screen and changing the channels.
They say travelling broadens the mind but it doesn't - travelling turns people into monsters and socio-paths. People might seem jolly, friendly and likeable even, but give them seven hours stacked up diagonally on a crowded flight and they'll all but trample each other in their desperation to get off the thing. When I die I'd like to come back the person sitting in front of every inconsiderate seat recliner I've ever sat behind.

The Sheffield gig was a fine start to the tour. We were still jet-lagged so it came as no surprise to me to discover half an hour from Sheffield that I'd left my amplifier in a cupboard in Norfolk. The promoter borrowed an amp from the folk guitar player Martin Simpson. Just what a folk guitar player is doing with a Vox AC15 I don't know but it was very kind of him to lend it to me. Apparently he's really good – one of the organisers left me in no doubt of this. Now he really is a great player, with a tacit not like you in brackets. I found it slightly offensive. I'm a good guitar player too.

We're supposed to be launching a Kickstarter thing to raise money to put out our fabulous new album. To do this we have to edit a little introductory film so I suppose I should just post this dwindling jet-lagged ramble and get on with it.

Watch out for the Kickstarter thing.

The Dogshit Pub, a rambling discourse

In my last post I alluded to that dreadful place where Harold Shipman came from. Now I feel I should explain. The dreadful place is a town called Hyde. We were booked to play there at a club in the upstairs room of a pub. I started writing this piece soon after the event but never got round to finishing or posting it.

We've done them all - played in clubs, pubs, concert halls, village halls, town halls, record shops, pool halls, sandwich bars, bowling alleys, cinemas, shopping centres, open fields, and even the occasional living room. I'm fine with all of them but I've realised there's category of venue that may well be dying out, one which I'd been aware of but never consciously defined. I now call these venues dogshit pubs.
I called the promoter on the morning of the show. He told me there was a doubt whether or not it would go ahead because the pub had been broken into during the night. Amy's face lit up when I told her - she quite liked the idea of a cancellation because we'd been announced on their website as A Punk Legend. We've pretty well decided to not even entertain the idea of playing in a place that announces punk legends. Another barometer is Eddie & The Hot Rods. We've got nothing against Eddie & The Hot Rods but experience has shown us time and time again that venues that book Eddie & The Hot Rods don't work for us.
And when Eddie & The Hot Rods is combined on a yellow poster with a photo from my first album and A Punk Legend with two exclamation marks it generally means the venue is going to be a dogshit pub.

We'd driven down from Glasgow in the rain. It was still raining when we arrived. Rain suited the place. Hyde has two claims to fame: Moors Murderers Ian Brady and Myra Hindley who killed children in the sixties, and Dr Harold Shipman who euthanised somewhere in the region of two hundred elderly female patients in Hyde in the nineteen eighties. A hairdresser friend, a Mancunian who lives in South West France, opened his first salon there. He cut Harold Shipman's wife's hair and indeed lost a couple of clients to the good/bad doctor. He tried to warn us, he told us - Hyde is a dump.
We didn't get to see much of Hyde so I can't really comment, but the pub was sour and the audience beery, mouthy and seriously depleted. When we arrived a seedy looking man in an anorak came out of a side entrance. He told us, grim-faced, that we'd have to load in through the beer garden.
Beer garden: a couple of those integrated wooden bench and picnic table outings scattered around on dusty astro turf. The astro turf had seen a few years wear, the green worn to gritty greyness and dotted with large piles of rain-soaked dog shit.
The serious crime squad were in occupation, dusting the interior for fingerprints while teams of feral men dragged smashed and broken fruit machines out on to a concrete expanse at the back of the pub.
Carefully avoiding the dog shit - which was difficult because I didn't want to look at it - we loaded the equipment in to the venue via a wet, narrow, metal fire escape into the inevitable upstairs Concert Room. The stage was covered in tatty off-cuts of astro turf. I saw the arse end of a doberman disappear through a door marked Private. Please I thought, please, the doberman isn't allowed on the stage... please!!
There might not be any dog shit on the stage in a dogshit pub, though I have unfortunately come across it in the past, but you can always sense it - it's been there and now it's gone, leaving behind microscopic traces of disease and disgust, lurking in the hairy depths of a mushy carpet or in this case, raggy astro turf.
I wanted to go home, but we were here now and the organisers were nicer than at other classic dog shit pubs, notably the Spider's Web in Grimsby where the support act got paid more than I did and the dressing room was the emergency exit to the car park.

It's hard to exactly define the dogshit pub - the jazz club in Louth, Lincolnshire where we played last November looked for all the world like it was going to be a dogshit pub, but in spite of a framed photo of the Queen on the wall at the back of the stage, and the stench of disinfectant, stale beer and fifty years of cigarette smoke and meat pie dinners it just didn't make it. The fact that it was across the road from Robert Wyatt's house might have helped, and the clientele was all wrong - an audience of Lincolnshire post-hippy hippies and people who've merely ended up in a remote corner of a remote county - they just weren't dogshit pub people. A dogshit pub needs an undertow, a subtle suggestion at the least of a potential for the kind of violence that leads to hospitalisation.
And it helps if the landlord lives on the premises - there's so much more scope for squalor. And the landlord should look like a sea monster, and underneath the barnacled exterior there should beat a heart of either solid gold or solid shit, no half measures. Short measure in the optics quite possibly, but no half measures.
If you're lucky enough to be shown upstairs in a dogshit pub - possibly because as a punk legend (though he's probably never actually heard of you) the landlord feels you deserve a private place to change into your stage garb - in the bathroom, on a shelf above a grubby sink you'll find a bottle of Listerine, a tube of Anusol and a large can of highly scented deodorant which the staff are encouraged to use on their persons to mask the smell of fried food. The floor around the toilet will be littered with old VAT returns and well-thumbed books of what I believe is known as toilet humour.
This is a sweeping generalisation and I'm sure it's causing deep offence to members of the licensed victuallers trade but I don't really care because, believe me, I've suffered for my art and all that tosh.

I have a treasured memory of a pub in Brighton in the mid-nineties. In some ways it was the ultimate dogshit pub (but for a total lack of Punk Legend, Eddie & The Hot Rods, undercurrents of violence, or a sea monster landlord). A tiny building, originally part of Tamplins Brewery - one bar with a legal capacity of forty people, a ladies lavatory, a room with a trough in it where men could piss on their work boots, and upstairs a one bedroomed flat with a view over an adjacent council estate. The brewery had been demolished and all that was left was this solitary pub where old men came to mutter into half pints of mild ale and council estate residents congregated on Saturday afternoons to smoke cigarettes, swill lager and yell at the racing on the ancient TV set held aloft on a bracketed plywood shelf.
A friend of mine ended up running the place for a red-faced Irish builder who was redeveloping the site. The pub had to ostensibly stay open so that it wouldn't lose its license, so my friend endured many a grim evening with the aforementioned mild ale mutterers, and beery Saturday afternoons with the racing crowd.
At this time I believe his life was truly squalid. He lived in the flat over the pub with a chain-smoking girlfriend who was quite plainly mad and not a little vicious. The lack of custom drove him to opening the place in the evening to any band that needed a place to rehearse, and eventually the pub was voted Small Venue Of The Year by the NME or the Melody Maker in nineteen ninety something - I forget exactly when.
My friend's other job - his day job - was manning a cafe for the builders. The cafe was a semi-derelict room, the old brewery wages office, furnished with a deep fat fryer and a large tea urn. He deep-fried everything, apart from the tea. If someone ordered fried bread or fried tomatoes he just dropped them whole into the oil and dealt with the consequences after he'd fished them out, oil-sodden but cooked to perfection. The same with fried eggs - he'd crack them on the side of the fryer and drop them straight into the boiling oil.
The place was very popular with mud encrusted builders taking a break from demolishing things and digging foundations for the thirty-something low rent houses that were going to be erected, or clustered around, a bijou dogshit pub on the site of the old brewery.
One Saturday night I found myself sitting on a dubious three-seater sofa in the upstairs living room of my friend's pub, my mother on one side of me, my daughter Luci on the other, while downstairs the bar filled up with an expectant audience of round about twice the legal limit, all come to see me play. (This was in the days before I moved back to Brighton and became one of the mundane fixtures and fittings.) We were surrounded by discarded takeaway packaging, the coffee table on front of us was cluttered with empty beer and cider bottles, punctuated at intervals by three large pub ashtrays, each one overflowing with an avalanche of ash and cigarette butts. Dating Game contestants silently mouthed on a large greasy-screened TV beyond the coffee table and a blue Pearl Export drum kit skulked in the corner on a litter of broken drum sticks. My mother looked around the room, an incredulous look on her face, and quietly asked no one in particular how can people live like this?

I don't know how, I just know they do. One night fifteen or so years later Amy's daughter Hazel took us to her boyfriend's apartment in Chicago . He shared it with several other hip young guys and whatever slacker didn't happen to have an apartment of their own that month. Four thousand miles away, the other side of an ocean, and there was the same coffee table, beer bottles with blackening half-smoked cigarettes slowly rotting in their rancid dregs, the overflowing ashtrays, the same dubious sofa.
A drunken fratboy friend dropped by. He addressed me as dude and managed to pour half a bottle of some disgustingly sticky alcopops beverage over me whilst attempting to engage me in a ritualistic rock 'n' roll handshake. I was cool about it - actually I quite enjoyed his embarrassment, his grovelling apologies. But I had to tell him that nobody, and I mean nobody, calls me dude. Hazel said, 'What can you expect - he had a neck tattoo.'

This thing seems to be taking an anthropological turn. Haven't had one of those since I played in Oldham back in 2005. I think I'll go with it:

Imagine how Thor Heyerdahl would have felt if all he'd found at the end of the Kon-Tiki Expedition, having crossed an ocean on a ramshackle raft, was a coffee table covered in beer bottles and cigarette ash. And a guy with a neck tattoo had spilled a drink over him. Not that I'm saying I'm disappointed, just pointing out that things don't change much. Civilisations move slowly, though I think ours accelerated into a nose dive in the early eighties.
The nineteen eighties: the heyday of dogshit pubs - the days of drunken driving and smoking indoors. People liked to improve things and to that end they would fit pine-effect melamine around varnished Victorian woodwork and make it look neat with a tube of Kitchen & Bathroom Silicone and their thumb. Public bars and saloon bars were knocked into one and filled with sub-tropical pot plants and sofas. Deludedly envisaged as places where people with jobs could come and relax after a day at the office.
The sofas suffered the stains and cigarette burns of clumsy and incontinent beer drinkers. The sub-tropical pot plants wilted and died, suffocated by secondary smoke. Big men indulged in fist fights in the beer garden. Freelance pea-treaders were employed to come in on Saturdays and painstakingly grind processed peas into the carpets. Everything had to be perfect for mal-guided pre-internet travellers who might stumble across and into the place under the mistaken impression that the Carvery Fayre was going to be home-cooked and nutritious, if not delicious.
Things went rapidly downhill - they always did. From Grand Opening to Disturbance At The Showboat Public House - it only took a couple of months. We weren't as good at sophistication as we thought we were. Soon shitting alsations patrolled the staircase and the front door was manned by burly men armed with walkie-talkies.
Karaoke Nite
Happy Hour
Giant Screen TV
All Major Sporting Events duly celebrated...
A slow, inevitable decline: meat raffles, quiz nights, drinks promotions, a half-hearted attempt at a tribute band venue - if you closed your eyes you would've sworn it was John and Paul sitting in the corner strumming through a few numbers on their acoustic guitars...
Plywood nailed over the doors and windows.
Weeds growing through the tarmac in the car park.
The End.

I really don't know where that leaves us but I hope I've amused rather than depressed.

Greetings From The Empire State

I've been wondering how to go about doing this sort of thing again. I've got so much and so little to say all at the same time, and I sometimes think I prefer reading Amy's blog than writing anything myself. It sort of lets me off the hook. But it nags at me - I still want to do it - even though I preferred the days before everyone had a blog, when there was something wonderfully ridiculous about a minor pop star writing about a trip to the supermarket or a dust up with a council official.

But I enjoyed the writing and I miss it so here's a snippet of my new (or perhaps not so new by now) life in wonderful upstate New York...

It's probably going to take another year or so to get this house sorted out but at least we're not living in a caravan. Which is just as well considering a mild winters day barely gets above freezing round here. Or that's what they say. We've been lucky, we've had the mildest winter anyone can remember. It still cost us an oil field's worth of fuel to heat the place - I think most of the heat went up through the uninsulated roof while the furnace kept the hot water tank at boiling point twenty four hours a day. Seriously - you could have made a British cup of tea with water from the hot tap.

But the winter was quite jolly - there were sunny days with deep blue skies - even when the temperature was somewhere terrifyingly below zero (at least for a soft English southerner like myself). The Catskill Mountains loomed over the shopping centre and threatened to get cover in snow, but they never really did..

One Sunday morning sometime back in October we walked out of the house to buy a newspaper and by the time we got back, about twenty minutes later, we'd seen a snake, a freight train and a mountain. And all before breakfast. We hear freight trains in the night - very romantic. We met a woman whose husband drives the train. He's called Doug. I didn't catch her name. She says he leaves home trying to look as though it's just a job and he'd rather be fishing, but there's a certain swagger that tells her he's thrilled to be driving the train. So when we hear the banshee wail of a distant train whistle in the middle of the night I think there goes Doug...

Of course it could as well be his mate Gary or Frank, which brings me to another point: the men round here are all called Gary, unless they're called Frank. Occasionally you come across a Jim and once a Chuck, but mostly it's Frank or Gary. I've yet to meet a Hank. In a bygone era I imagine this place was cluttered with Hanks but no more.
I feel as though I'm in a film half the time and the supermarket checkout ladies are all besotted because of my accent - they try to keep me talking. Buying paint in the Home Depot I felt like James Bond. The woman that mixes the custom colours nearly came adrift. If Amy hadn't been there I don't know what might have become of me. The woman actually told Amy something to that effect herself.
Other times they think I'm bonkers and scurry away dragging quizzical-eyed children. They think I'm putting it on, an ex-mental patient from Idaho trying out a new identity. Sometimes I turn into Terrence Stamp in The Limey, and that really confuses them.

The neighbours are very friendly thank God. Friendly but not overbearing - they keep a respectful distance. Soon after we moved in the lady over the back popped round with an apple cinnamon cake all wrapped in foil. She took a quick glance around - that is, I assume she did, because that's what I would have done in her place - and told us to put our feet up, have a cup of coffee and a slice of cake. There wasn't much for her to look at because the container hadn't arrived yet, and we couldn't invite her to stay because we only had two chairs.
A couple of days later we were strolling round the local supermarket - the Price Chopper on Price Chopper Plaza (only in America...) - we saw a display of apple cinnamon cakes that looked exactly like the one the neighbour gave us, except these ones were packed in transparent plastic containers. Of course we bought one, took it home and did a bit of comparing and contrasting. Quite possibly exactly the same.
But it's the thought that counts. I should mention the cake was delicious, and we were touched by such a kind gesture, and I'm sort of hoping it was a repackaged supermarket cake because it makes for a better story, me being English and cynical and so on.

Then we heard about Neighbour Dan... Neighbour Dan and Cake Neighbour live next door to each other. They don't get on. Our next door neighbour's son told us there was a boundary dispute, which I suppose accounts for the odd line the fence takes dividing the two properties. No one, it seemed, likes Neighbour Dan, but we resolved to keep an open mind and say hello one day when he's out and about and the other neighbours aren't. Even though the next door neighbour's son let it drop that Neighbour Dan had our patio bricks away just before we moved in. I was wondering why there was a square of mud in the middle of the back garden or yard as they call it over here. I thought it might be something to do with Druids or some sort of crop circle related phenomenon, but dismissed the idea - America's too young a country for that sort of malarkey.
Time crept along we never had met Neighbour Dan, we didn't even know his name, until one well-scrubbed November morning a dubious character crossed our front lawn and there was a knocking at the door... Denim shrt, white t-shirt, Walmart work jeans, a pair of Timberlands, cigarette shielded against the elements in a cupped palm, ever shifting eyes, a sparse black widows peak.
He'd come round to introduce himself.
To extend the hand of friendship.
To offer to lend me tools.
He'd come to explain himself...
It seems that the previous owners appointed Neighbour Dan caretaker of the property in their absence. From what we've picked up from the other neighbours, including the local chief of police who lives just over the road, the previous occupants loaded a van in the middle of the night and fucked off to South Carolina leaving a house full of junk (two dumpsters worth apparently) and a lot of outstanding bills, including the mortgage, which is why we were able to buy it from a bank at a knockdown price.
As payment for his services, mowing the lawn, shovelling snow, that sort of thing, the previous owners paid Neighbour Dan in patio bricks and an above-ground swimming pool which we were welcome to have back though it would break lil' Danny's heart - you should have seen him the day we brought it over, his lil' eyes were shining...
I declined the offer of the return of the swimming pool - it crossed my mind that the only reason he'd be giving it back would be because it had a hole in it. And I'm glad I did because the other day our nice next door neighbours told me day that when that pool was in our yard the water in it was green and swimming with frog spawn but it didn't stop the former occupants kids from jumping into it.
Of course they might have just been trying to get clean after spending too long in the house.
Anyway, I told him I was surprised to hear that the banks were employing caretakers to look after their foreclosures but he didn't react, just backed down the path a couple of respectful paces and took a puff on the ill-concealed cigarette. He blew out smoked, looked around, and said in a confidential tone, 'I don't know what the neighbours might have been telling you about me, but none of it's true.'
'Oh,' I said, 'they've had nothing but good to say about you.'
We haven't spoken since.

We've been recording. The first thing we did was install the studio. I built walls, real ones with double thicknesses of plasterboard - or sheet rock as they call it over here. could be a genre that:
'How would you describe your music?' (A stupid but popular question - you don't describe it, you play it and people listen)
'Well, it's what we call sheet rock...'
In the old French house Amy's work room was directly above the studio. She was almost vibrated off her chair on a daily basis by errant bass frequencies. If a band came to record she quite often had to leave the house and spend a day in the library. Actually that's not true - you couldn't spend a day in the library where we lived, just three hours in the morning and a couple more hours in the afternoon, depending on the day of the week, after a two hour lunch break in a cafe being ogled by dining farmers.
We haven't had any bands in yet but we have had Chris Butler playing drums on several tracks on our new album. Chris is a fierce drummer - I found myself wearing headphones more as ear protectors than for monitoring purposes. Chris had a band called The Waitresses who had a hit with I Know What Boys Like. He was on Stiff Records courtesy of the Akron compilation. He played the bass on one of my favourite Stiff Records - Yankee Wheels by Jayne Aire & The Belvederes. He's my hero! He's also the greatest drummer I've ever recorded.
(OK Chris, if you could make the cheque out to cash...)
The new Eric & Amy album is going to be eleven or so original tunes - I think we've cleverly circumnavigated the tricky third album syndrome by doing a covers album second. Usually by the third album all the good ideas are used up and there's been no time to conjour up some new ones. But we've had all the time in the world between fixing up houses, packing containers, applying for Green Cards, putting up ceilings, braving floods, hurricanes, gigs in places like Louth and that dreadful place where Harold Shipman came from... so we've written a concept album about sheet rock. It's called Sheet Rock...

Actually some of that's a lie.

I must be off now, I've got some bass frequencies to round up. It's good to be back.

Show Biz Wonderland

I think we're finally living in the sort of house that a bohemian pop star couple should live in. White walls, tasteful pale grey woodwork - a perfect backdrop for all the artworks, trophies and trinkets that we've picked up on our exotic travels though Show Biz Wonderland.

Admittedly we don't have a walk-in wardrobe or dressing room (walk-in wardrobe??!! I sound more like an estate agent than a pop artiste) lined with fantastic stage costume creations, all mirrors and rhinestones, from the zips and leather and safety pins of our humble punk beginnings, the padded shoulders and velvet knickerbockers of our unfortunate eighties New Romantic period, the Nudie suits from our country phase, cuban heels and flat heels and stack heels, wigs and hairpieces and codpieces and mirkins... (Mirkins? Fuck no - I draw the line at pubic wigs).

Anyway, there's none of that - we've got rid of every piece of clothing that we can't fit into, wore out the mirkins weeks ago using them to wipe down paintwork. And the artworks, trophies and trinkets, such as they are, are all stashed away in the attic where they won't put off the queue of perspective buyers who have as yet failed to answer any of our adverts.

We haven't got a hot tub or a jacuzzi either. In fact we haven't even got a bath tub - just one of those weird French hipbath things that are neither bath nor shower, but would probably make an ideal receptacle in which to sponge down an old lady. Or gentleman - I don't want to be accused of sexism here.

The lack of a real bathroom shouldn't worry us too much because I think everyone knows that the godlike status of Pop Icon puts us above all that - hygiene, sanitation, toilet paper - we have no need of these things.

It may be a problem if some lesser mortals decide to buy our house. And this is a thought that has depressed me in the last week. I spent days routing through junk in the studio, coiling leads and sorting through tape reels, finally letting go of things that won't ever get fixed - useful things that are forever completely beyond repair. I had plenty of time to think about what we've achieved in this eighteen foot by ten foot room with its high tongue and groove ceiling and triple glazed window to front affording magnificent views across surrounding countryside. Amy and I have made two albums in this room, plus the forthcoming Rotifer album, the Gil Rose & Les Hydropathes album Haute et Courte, plus various tracks for forty-fives and compilation albums. Amy and I learned to trust each others judgement in this room. We both developed musically and I gained confidence as a recording engineer. All those recordings - Here Comes My Ship, Bobblehead Doll, The Downside Of Being A Fuck-Up, Astrovan, Put A Little Love In Your Heart, A Taste Of The Keys, Walls, Teflon Wok, I Wanna Be Your Happiness, Please Be Nice To Her, Silver Shirt to name a few - they all came out of this room. In a few months time it could be the living room of a glum family. They'll sit in here watching TV, oblivious to the past history of this wonderful room.

Or maybe someone will turn it into an art studio and paint masterpieces in here, or write a book - Amy's written most of a book in the room above, plus all her great diary entries, all the while being vibrated and occasionally deafened by the swirling aural chaos coming up through the floor. That tongue and groove let through more sound than I ever thought it would. It was varnished dark brown woodstain when we moved in, I painted every inch of it several times with a brush until it achieved the grubby white finish it has today. I hope the buying public don't look up too closely...

We put the house on sale yesterday, and today we're going on tour for a couple of weeks. Just as well because we don't want to leave sticky paw prints and coffee mug rings everywhere. We also need to see if we can still play music after three months work in what you might call the arse-crack sector. We'll be finding out tomorrow night in Innsbruck.

Meanwhile if you're looking for a dez rez in glorious South West France at a knockdown price look no further than here:

houseinthehautevienne.weebly.com

We'll pick you up at the airport in a couple of weeks time. Don't forget your cheque book!

Everything must go... somewhere

I've just started to dismantle parts of the studio in attempt to make it look more like a family living room and less like a madcap science laboratory crossed with counter espionage and propaganda headquarters from a low grade B movie. I don't know how I've managed to collect and hang on to so much junk over the years, but I've decided it's someone else's turn to own some of it. I'm going to have a sale, and to that end I've been photographing every random piece of electrical equipment ready to advertise it all on my website, put it on ebay, hold an open house yard sale type of event...













Would somebody like to make an offer for a Lamb Laboratories 24 volt power supply? I've had it since 1988 when somebody gave me a four channel Revox mixing desk which I had repaired at great expense only to find that it was even more crappy sounding than the Wem Audiomaster five channel desk which I eventually used to mix Le Beat Group Electrique and The Donovan Of Trash. Those records were in mono because the Audiomaster only had one output and anyway it's a bit difficult to mix four tracks into useful stereo. It all worked out quite well on Le Beat Group - I remember it well, track one for the bass, track two was the guitar and drumkit, track three for the vocals (which I did live along with the guitar, bass and drums), leaving track four for all the overdubs.
The overdub sessions were a great laugh - I can vividly recollect playing the organ with one hand, shaking a rhythmically sketchy maraca with the other and almost headbutting the front of Andre's acoustic guitar held up to the vocal mike as we lunged for a backing vocal... It was desperate but the energy level was good. We lived on cups of tea, chocolate digestives bscuits and nervous energy - dropping in and out, trying for a modicum of perfection without erasing any of the good bits. The horrified shout of "turn it off!!!" just before True Happiness is the real thing - I'd left Andre recording bits of dialogue from a Will Hay film on the TV while I was in the kitchen making yet another pot of tea. I suddenly realised that our attempts to create an interweaved sound collage to introduce the song was about to actually obliterate the song itself.

I didn't know how to edit tape in those days so the final three songs, Fuck By Fuck, Parallel Beds and True Happiness had to be mixed in one go. I think it was eleven minutes in total and I had to work out all the level changes and echo effects and then mix it down to 1/4" two track tape in glorious mono in one go. I got it just about right the first time and decided to live with it because I didn't think my delicate nerves could stand another run through. After all, I'd only been out of the mental hospital for six months.
For the past couple of years we've had a Farfisa home organ in our hallway. Some of the noises that make up the Bobblehead Doll loop came from it, although they were distorted way beyond what they originated as, slowed down, reversed and edited together with I can't even remember what now. Amy just put the organ up for sale on a site for English ex-pats. We've had quite a success selling stuff there - we got rid of the ambulance and a hideous woodburner which was little more than a metal box from Spain with a door on the front. Come to think of it the ambulance was little more than a metal box from Italy masquerading as a Peugeot, not that that's got much to do with anything.

I'm secretly hoping that no one wants the Farfisa home organ - I had to confess to Amy that when I'm home alone I sometimes freak out on it for ten minutes. The thing holds such recording promise if only I could get around to it, harness the moment. It has automation, meaning that when you select bossa nova, disco or rock 1 or rock 2, it plays a sort of bass arpeggio and you can switch on a setting that throws in a vamping off beat.
Amy's just come up the stairs to tell me we've had two replies to the advert. 'Wouldn't it be great,' she said 'if somebody came and picked it up tomorrow.' I tried not to look too crestfallen. I may have to down tools and make a recording tomorrow morning. Surely there'll be a home organ or two in the United States.
The same goes for amplifiers. There are a lot of great amplifiers over there. I hope they haven't all found permanent homes - most of mine are going to be re-homed before we go. But not the Selmer Truvoice 50 that I use on stage, so don't anyone get over-excited.
And if anyone's after the Wem Audiomaster it's presently residing in a house near Chartres where it's been in storage since the last time I left France. I must go and pick it up - would it be too ridiculously sentimental to hang on to it?

Two days have passed while I searched for the battery charger for the camera so that I can upload some of these scintillating photos, and in the meantime the advert has been answered. A nice man called Tim came and took the organ away. I'm sad to think that all those fabulous tracks I had planned are destined to become just a fading memory in the back of my overcrowded mind - I never had time to down tools and make the recording. Now the hallway looks naked to me. But very desirable - naked and desirable, minimal and buyable. Tim used to be a DJ on Radio Caroline, he remembers The Blockheads when they were Loving Awareness. We had a good chat. He told me all his vinyl, three thousand albums in total, is in storage but before he packed it away and moved house he decided to listen to all of them in alphabetical order, one album a day. It took him five years and his wife left him during the Frank Zappa section.



This is a photo of the fireplace in our kitchen. I didn't tear it out of a magazine, it's real. Someone is going to love this house. Please...

Padam, Padam, Pa-fucking-dam

I looked into the blackness and asked if everything was all right. I didn't really care one way or the other, but I was curious. We'd played six songs so far and the only reaction was a clapping clatter of the sort you might hear at a village cricket match when the away team scores two runs. I could tell that a good time was not being had. During the preceding number it had briefly crossed my mind that I've seen people having more fun at just about every funeral I've ever attended. I thought perhaps a tragedy of some sort had struck the audience and we'd somehow missed it.
I wasn't ready for the response:
Le son est affreux...
Le sono est terrible...
Les instruments sont trop fort - on ne peut pas entendre les paroles...
The sound is awful - the PA is terrible - the instruments are too loud, one can't hear the lyrics.
I wanted to be nice about - that is, I didn't want the evening to end early and on a sour note, and for us to leave without getting paid. I wanted to say "Are you fucking stupid? You're all French, most of you don't understand English which is the language we're singing in, and you wouldn't understand the lyrics if they climbed up the seam of your fleece and bit you on the ear."
But that would never do.
Instead I started to say "Well, you would think that because you see, you're French, and this is rock 'n' roll and you don't really understand it - in fact you're barely qualified to even listen to it".
But I was getting into deep water with that so I changed tack and gently explained that the lyrics don't actually mean anything, they're just a noise that goes along with everything else, the sound of the instruments and so forth, so in fact they weren't actually missing anything at all. Then I pushed the master fader up on the PA so that there was a slight, desperate ring of feedback, and we carried on, louder and slightly more insecure than before.
I think you would have had to have been deaf as a fucking coot and psychologically blocked not to hear the singing. After we'd finished we met up with the remaining members of the audience, the ones that hadn't fled to God knows what personal misery they spend their time wallowing in, the well-balanced ones, the ones that like us. We were assured that the sound was good, perfect even.
It hurts me to see Amy leave the stage depressed and feeling like jacking it all in. But it happens every time we play in France. We perform in front of scowling people, fingers in their earholes, pain and bewilderment on their faces. I can only think they're too stupid to realise that they could actually leave. A cretinous man approached us at one place and asked us to turn down. "You sing very well, and the madamoiselle too" he added, "but the instruments are too loud - we can't hear ourselves talking well enough to hold a conversation."
We've been expected to carry on while moronic French skinheads sing rugby songs and Padam Padam Pa-fucking-dam, while people clatter in and out of the door as though it was a bus station, tossing a glance of total incomprehension (of everything in the whole bloody universe) our way as they pass in front of us. We've even had a four year old yelling at us to stop while his horrible family held a noisy birthday party for him, oblivious to the small but appreciative, and increasingly irritated audience that had come to hear us play.
France doesn't deserve us and I don't know what we've done to deserve France.

But at least France doesn't know, or care who we are. So for a brief while it doesn't matter that I'm not allowed to be me on Facebook any more.